Due to the nature of the work, customer call centres are noted high-stress environments when compared to other subsets of the same business and to other industries. Two studies in two separate call centres were performed to assess the impact of a portable heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback device on employee performance ratings and stress-related complaints. Results from the first study i...

Decreased vagal activity and increased sympathetic arousal have been proposed as major contributors to the increased risk of cardiovascular mortality in patients with depression. It was aim of the present study to assess the feasibility of using heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback to treat moderate to severe depression. This was an open-label study in which 14 patients with different degre...

Metrics of heart rate variability (HRV) are widely used in medical diagnostics, physiological research, and biofeedback training (TaskForce, 1996; Wheat & Larkin, 2010). HRV metrics are typically based on non-invasive measurements of cardiac function using electrocardiography (ECG) or photoplethysmography (PPG). A specific point is identified in each cardiac cycle, and the inter-beat interval (...

The player’s personality in games has been studied in recently. This study explored whether the game types could affect learner’s learning emotions in educational games or not and inferred which kind of game has the potential in education. As a sample, 40 players were recruited to evaluate three electronic games on training players’ abilities to use the games. In this paper, the players’ heart ...

Previous studies investigating depersonalization disorder (DPD) report a lower baseline skin conductance level (SCL) and attenuated skin conductance response (SCR) to emotive stimuli. We hypothesized that increasing physiological arousal levels via electrodermal biofeedback may ameliorate disembodiment and emotional numbing symptomatology. Real-time versus sham biofeedback yielded a significant...

This paper compares the effectiveness of two biofeedback mechanisms to promote acquisition and transfer of deepbreathing skills using a casual videogame. The first biofeedback mechanism, game adaptation, delivers respiratory information by altering an internal parameter of the game; the second, visual biofeedback, displays respiratory information explicitly without altering the game. We conduct...

This paper reviews the history of heart rate variability biofeedback. Interest in the method has evolved from several directions, eventually mutually influencing each other, and often through workshops provided by the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback. My own work was influenced by long-term use of the technique in Russia, and from research by Evgeny Vaschillo using trans...